Thursday, April 22, 2010

The Lex - recommended.

Hop over and say g'day to my mate Lex if you're interested in aviation and such. He has a way with words, and puts my paltry efforts in the shade.

Neptunus Lex

If you're not cheating, you're not trying. That is some excellent advice right there.

There is a VFR reporting point near Bankstown called 2RN, which is also a Sydney radion station, ABC Radio National. A very tall, but very skinny radio tower, 1350 feet high - and the reporting altitude is 1500 feet, so spotting the thing is advisable, lest you bump into it, 150 feet being a scant distance from something that would tear open an aeroplanes belly in a heartbeat. At night it is one miserable strobe among a sea of street lights, car lights, house lights and all the attendant illumination of a modern city. I was doing a night training flight and heading back to Bankstown, my unscrupulous instructor Jeff choosing 2RN as our inbound point. Try as I might I could not see 2RN to save my life, which was becoming truer by the minute. I gave up and confessed my failure to Jeff, whereupon he dialled the radio frequency for Radio National and the ADF needle sprung to it like a pointy thing in a pointing competition. I knew I could do that, I said. Well why didn't you, he not unreasonably asked.

It felt like cheating.